D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

[Parmandur]

Presuming I'm understanding you correctly (i.e. that "theybare" is supposed to be "they are"), that doesn't indicate that it's a better strategy, simply because we can't attribute those higher sales/ROI to their new product release schedule. As was noted earlier in the thread, a lot of factors (many of which are outside of WotC's control) are responsible for why 5E is so popular now. Saying "they slowed down the release schedule, and that's why they're profitable now" isn't a deep, or correct, analysis.

You may feel thst way, yet I believe itnis a major positive factor in their success, not being held back by bloat.

 

[Parmandur]

No, that's not at all similar. I don't know why you'd think it was (unless you're making a veiled reference to piracy).

No, I mean that adopting a slow and steady release schedule is pro-consumer, by not flooding the market.

 

[Alzrius]

You may feel thst way, yet I believe itnis a major positive factor in their success, not being held back by bloat.

I disagree. I think that the "bloat" idea is vastly overstated, and has no real evidence to support it, save for people mistakenly thinking that what happened to TSR is relatable to what happened to 3.5 and 4E.

 

[Alzrius]

No, I mean that adopting a slow and steady release schedule is pro-consumer, by not flooding the market.

I don't believe that it is, and that "flooding the market" is a bogeyman with little to support it, at least where D&D is concerned. Again, the overproduction of materials that sank TSR is not relatable to the Hasbro era, and the RPG market strikes me as being in a boom right now; concerns about a flood are at best vastly overrated.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I don't believe that it is, and that "flooding the market" is a bogeyman with little to support it, at least where D&D is concerned. Again, the overproduction of materials that sank TSR is not relatable to the Hasbro era, and the RPG market strikes me as being in a boom right now; concerns about a flood are at best vastly overrated.

Just to make the salient point-

3.5e was release in June of 2003.
4e was announced August 2007, and released the next year.

That means that 3.5e had an actual lifespan at WoTC of 4 years (five if we're counting up until the actual release).

Just because it was still somewhat profitable at the end, doesn't mean that the trends were good. There's a difference between "still profitable" and "growing."

 

[MichaelSomething]

To quote Stepahine Sterling, "Corporations don't want some of the money; they want ALL of the money."

 

[dave2008]

I disagree. I think that the "bloat" idea is vastly overstated, and has no real evidence to support it, save for people mistakenly thinking that what happened to TSR is relatable to what happened to 3.5 and 4E.

We do have WotC employees who have said it was a factor and in particular books after the core make less and less as the edition goes on. So we haven't seen all the numbers (at least that I know of), but we have had people who where there say the product schedule had an effect on profitability. That doesn't prove the inverse is true, but 5e as a test case has been a huge success.

 

[Alzrius]

Just to make the salient point-

3.5e was release in June of 2003.
4e was announced August 2007, and released the next year.

That means that 3.5e had an actual lifespan at WoTC of 4 years (five if we're counting up until the actual release).

Just because it was still somewhat profitable at the end, doesn't mean that the trends were good. There's a difference between "still profitable" and "growing."

Well, we don't have all the details, at least until Ben Riggs gets further along on his next book. But while I agree that 3.5 sales were probably slowing down (like literally every other edition, up to and including 5E), that's a far cry from the idea that its release schedule was destined from the beginning to lead to failure.

 

[Oofta]

And here I thought you had nothing more to add.

All kidding aside, I'll spell this out one more time, since you still seem to be confused: WotC's focus on return on investment and profit maximization was brought up initially with regard to why it's fallacious to suggest that you can't print large numbers of high-crunch products as a sustainable business model, in that it was a failure to hit their ROI under such a model that led them to abandon that practice, rather than that model being inherently unsustainable.

With regard to WotC's bad behavior, I gave you plenty of other examples for why people feel that WotC is a "profits first, excellence second" company (and why people tend to look askance at that, as opposed to a company that reverses those values). Your response was something along the lines of "as long as they're trying to make money, it's okay" and "you can't hold something against them if they later reverse that policy," to which I made it very clear why that's not the case for a lot of people.

Virtually every company that wants to stay in business puts profits first, it's not an incompatible goal with producing what they feel is a quality product if they consider long term profitability.

How that relates to how many books they produce goes back to ROI analysis. TSR was pretty horrible at it, they seemed to have learned their lesson in 3E and 4E that pushing out a ton of material can mean lower ROI. Whether by luck (because they never expected 5E to succeed) or by planning, it seems that they now believe a slower release rate is the best ROI. I think it also happens to be good for the hobby as a byproduct.

 

[Alzrius]

We do have WotC employees who have said it was a factor and in particular books after the core make less and less as the edition goes on. So we haven't seen all the numbers (at least that I know of), but we have had people who where there say the product schedule had an effect on profitability. That doesn't prove the inverse is true, but 5e as a test case has been a huge success.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there wasn't a drop-off over time; that's been universal insofar as editions of D&D go. But my understanding is that 3.5 was wrapped up because it was consistently falling short of the target number that was set for it, with Ryan Dancey's implication that said number was unrealistic. Now, it's hitting that number, but that strikes me as being more due to a confluence of external factors than anything to do with the release schedule.